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SCRIPT FROM INTRODUCTORY VIDEO

INTRO
    - I'm Mike Ellis, author of PeerTool, a free web application for
      collaborative brainstorming and decision making.
    - Peertool is designed for use by small groups, especially boards,
      committees, teams and task forces in the non-profit sector.
    - Peertool is available for your use at peertool.appspot.com
    - You can also download the complete source code and install it on a server
      of your choice.
    - This screencast will focus on using the application.
    

REGISTERING
    - For your privacy and security, we require you to register an account.
    - Fill in your name, email, and choose a good password
    - Read the terms of service and click submit.
    - You'll receive a confirming email from peertool@gmail.com.
    - If you don't see it, check your spam folder.
    - Click the link, then log in

CONCEPTS AND TERMINOLOGY
    - In PeerTool, a Problem is any well-defined task or challenge.
    - Solutions are possible responses to the problem
    - Criteria are distinct qualities for comparing solutions.
    - You could use a number of different synonyms:
        - Mission, ideas and values
        - Position, candidates and qualifications
        - Campaign, positions, and (appeal to) constituencies
        - ...
    - These concepts will become more clear as we walk through PeerTool's
      usage and features.

NEW
    - Let's start with creating a new Problem.
    - Click the New button in the menu.
    - Put a short title on the first line
    - Write a description of the problem
    - Your description can include hyperlinks, images, and embedded videos
    - Optionally, specify some different terminology
    - Click Submit

EDIT
    - This is the window where you and your team brainstorm ideas.
    - To help you keep track of what's what PeerTool uses 3 icons.
        - Rubik's cube for problems
        - Light bulb for solutions
        - Gauge for criteria
    - PeerTool helps you get started by suggesting a default solution and a
      catch-all criterion.
    - To see the full text of any item, click the label beside the icon.
    - To add a new item, click the icon beside the 'New' label
    - As you did with the problem description, use the editor to provide a
      title and description

INVITE
    - PeerTool assumes a certain level of trust amomg your group.
        - It's the same level of trust you would expect in a group discussion
          by email.
            - you know each other's email addresses
            - you trust each other to keep information confidential
    - To invite others, enter their email addresses one by one.
    - The invitations are not visible until you check the "Issue Invitations"
      box at the bottom of the page.
    - Issuing invitations makes some important changes in the problem:
        - It now belongs to the group.
            - Any group member can add new items and comments.
            - Any group member can invite new members.
            - No one can edit existing items or invitations.
            - But items can be deleted by a 75% super majority.

    - To discourage spammers, PeerTool does not send email to the people you
      invite.
    - If they are registered with PeerTool, they'll see your invitation next
      time they log in. 
        - In the future we may allow registered users to select a profile
          option that will enable email notifications.
    - Icons beside each invitation show who has accepted or declined. 

    - Problems are isolated from each other by their invitation lists.
        - You can participant in many different problems with entirely
          different teams.
        - No one has access or even knows about the existence of any problem
          without an invitation.

CHOOSE
    - This is where you accept or decline invitations
    - or choose which problem to work on
    - The table shows information about problems you've been invited to.
      It contains 
        - the title of each invitation,
        - who invited you, 
            - they know your email so you get to see theirs
        - Your acceptance status,
        - The current number of people who've accepted invitations.
        - The time since the last activity by any team member.
    - New invitations are shown in plain text, 
        - accepted ones as hyperlinks, 
        - rejected ones are struck through.
    - To accept invitations, click the check boxes and click Submit.
    - To reject an invitation, you currently have to accept it first. 
        - We're working on fixing that.
    - When you reject an invitation, you'll see an alert telling you:
        - Any responses you've made to the problem will be deleted.
        - The problem itself will be deleted when all active members resign.
    - To work on a particular problem, click its link. 
    - You'll be taken initially to the Respond page.

RESPOND
    - This is where you evaluate solutions, select criteria weights, and enter
      comments.
    - Each solution has a slider for each of the currently defined criteria.
        - Adjust each slider to indicate your assessment for each criterion.
        - The scale is -1.0 to +1.0 with -1 being extremely negative and +1
          extremely positive.
        - Zero is neutral, i.e. no opinion.
    - Toward the bottom of the page, each criterion is listed with a single
      slider beneath it.
        - These sliders are for your assessment of the relative importance of
          each criterion.
        - The scale is 0.0 to 1.0 with 0 being no importance and 1 being
          highest importance.
    - Internally PeerTool normalizes your criteria settings so that they add up
      to 1.0. 
        - This ensures that each person's solution assessments carry the same
          total weight.
        - If you set them all to 1.0 and there are 4 criteria, they'll each be
          normalized to 0.25
        - Same thing if you set them all to 0.0 or any other value.
        - A further example: if there are 4 criteria and you set them to 1,
          0.5, 0.5, and 0.0 the normalized values will be 0.5, 0.25, 0.25, and
          0.0.
            - After normalization, the first is still twice as important as the
              second and third and the fourth is still of no importance.
        - You don't need to worry much about this. Just set the sliders in the
          way that visually reflects the importance of the criteria to you.
    - As with the Edit page, you can click item labels to show or hide the full
      descriptions.
    - You can also enter comments on any solution, criterion or on the problem
      itself.
        - Your evaluations are anonymous, but your comments will show your user
          name
    - Finally, you can recommend deletion of any solution or criterion.  If 75%
      of your team agree, it will be removed.
    - Remember to click Submit to record your responses.

RESULTS
    - PeerTool computes each persons assessments of all solutions over all
      criteria.
    - The graphs will update in real time as new responses come in.
    - The page help has some very detailed discussion about the meaning of the
      graphics.
    - I'm only going to briefly summarize them here.
    - The solutions are ranked by overall favorability with the most favorable
      at the top.
    - The small pie charts track how many team members have responded to each
      solution and criterion.
        - This is necessary because new solutions and criteria can be added by
          any team member at any time.
        - Think of them as traffic signals - full green means everyone has
          responded.
            - Anything else, proceed with caution. All the results aren't in.
    - The solution histograms show the counts of fully weighted positive and
      negative responses.
        - Responses are color-coded. Negative blue, neutral gray, positive red.
        - The colors aren't strictly necessary. They're there to help you
          orient your eye in these small unlabeled graphs.
        - Click the graph to show weighted and raw counts for each criterion.
    - The criteria histograms show counts of the normalized responses from all
      users to each criterion.
        - The bars are black since no color is needed to highlight positive vs
          negative.
        - Criteria are listed by overall importance with the most important at
          the top.
    - You can download a CSV file containing all the response data.
        - Useful for specialized analysis.
        - Privacy of individual responses protected by randomized IDs.

USING PEERTOOL EFFECTIVELY
    - Start small and iterate.
        - It's not necessary define all possible solutions and criteria at the
          beginning.
        - Consider delivering the problem to the group with only the
          description and the default solution and criterion.
    - Keep a manageable number of solutions and criteria.
        - If you define 20 solutions and 20 criteria, you'll have 420 sliders
          to adjust!
        - Use deletion votes to remove clearly unfavorable solutions and
          clearly unimportant criteria.
        - Leaving in the 'Everything else' default criterion provides a way for
          members to implicitly include minor considerations in their
          responses.
    - Use the results page to facilitate discussion.
        - Focus on highly weighted criteria to avoid arguing over trivia.
        - If there is widespread disagreement, it may be because the solution
          and criterion descriptions are incomplete or unclear.
            - or it may be that some members have different experience or
              information
            - or team members may have different interests and values.
    - Use the results to propose new solutions that combine the best features
      of existing solutions.

CLONING
    - Click the clone button to generate a new problem from an existing one.
        - Contains problem description, solutions, criteria and invitations.
        - All responses and comments are deleted.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    - Web2py by Massimo di Pierro
        - Awesome enterprise web development framework
        - Most helpful discussion group I've ever encountered.
    - CKEditor by Frederico Krabben
        - full featured html editor
    - jQuery by John Resig
        - takes the pain out of javascript 
    - Python by Guido van Rossum
        - most productive programming language I've ever used.
    - Google App Engine and Google Code
        - free hosting for open source applications and source code.
    
    - Influences
        - Roger Fisher (Getting to Yes, Harvard Program on Negotiation)
        - James Surowiecki (The Wisdom of Crowds)
        - Lotfi Zadeh (Fuzzy Logic)
        - Antonio D'Amasio (The Feeling of What Happens)

    - Al Jacobson, friend and early supporter of PeerTool
    - Christine Grant - my partner in life and in business


FINALLY
    - If you've listened this far, thanks very much for your attention and
      interest and I hope you find PeerTool useful.
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